Zoo Meaning
/zuː/Definition, CEFR level A1, pronunciation, examples, and quiz.
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Definition
nounA park where live animals are exhibited.
nounAny place that is wild, crowded, or chaotic.
Sentence Examples
I went to the zoo yesterday.
Can you tell me where the nearest zoo is?
CEFR Practice Quiz
The children were excited to see lions and tigers at the ____ this afternoon.
CEFR Practice Quiz (Alternate)
We took the children to the city ____ last weekend to see several many different and interesting animals from several countries today.
Word Origin & History
Clipping of zoological garden or zoological park, now the usual form. See zoology. * Sense 5 is a clipping of zoophile or zoophilia.
Literary Quotations & Historical Citations
"The San Juan market is Mexico City's most famous deli of exotic meats, where an adventurous shopper can hunt down hard-to-find critters such as ostrich, wild boar and crocodile. Only the city zoo offers greater species diversity."
— 2013 July 26, Nick Miroff, “Mexico gets a taste for eating insects as chefs put bugs back on the menu”, in The Guardian Weekly, volume 189, number 7, archived from the original on 26 Apr 2023, page 32:
"After his insightful book The Art of Alfred Hitchcock, Spoto published The Dark Side of Genius, a portrayal of the elderly director as a lonely man who was a veritable zoo of desires, suspicions, fears, and addictions (food, drink, romantic infatuation, and filmmaking)."
— 1993, Neil P. Hurley, Soul in Suspense: Hitchcock's Fright and Delight, page xii:
"From this point on, an entire zoo of possibilities arose: strange stars, different families of neutron stars, hybrid stars, etc."
— 2001, Antonino Zichichi, Theory and Experiment Heading for New Physics:
"But powerful as the quark model and the electroweak theory were in describing the zoo of subatomic particles, this still left a huge gap."
— 2021, Michio Kaku, The God Equation:
"I'm not all that unhappy about being out on an actual patrol, but there's a worried feeling wandering around the back of my mind, not exactly fear, more like a sort of lurking anxiety at being out in the dreaded jungle, the zoo, where the enemy hides."
— 2013 August 12, E. E. "Doc" Murdock, “My Vietnam War”, in (Please provide the book title or journal name), →ISBN, page 152:
Explore More A1 Vocabulary Words
CEFR Practice Quiz
The children were excited to see lions and tigers at the ____ this afternoon.
CEFR Practice Quiz (Alternate)
We took the children to the city ____ last weekend to see several many different and interesting animals from several countries today.